Slow Down

This concept applies to many aspects of photography, but I'll start with the tripod. If you're not currently shooting with a tripod, you're doing it wrong. If you're not shooting with a tripod, you're walking around, probably at a feverish pace, taking pictures of nearly literally everything. You're having fun. You're having a blast. Then, when you get home, you wonder how you're ever going to sort through the several hundred (or thousand) photos, most of which you knew where just snapshots when you took them, but you were having so much fun doing it, you just couldn't help yourself. The goal is not to capture a complete historical record of your trip. The goal is to capture images that will make people say, "Wow!" Even if you somehow manage to capture a thousand wow inducing images in a day (spoiler alert: you can't), there's not a single person on the planet capable of looking at all of them and remaining evenly remotely interested. Capture less, keep more.

By forcing yourself to shoot from a tripod, you have to put more thought into where you're going to place it. Just this little extra thought per image will produce tremendous results. By artificially increasing the amount of effort required to take a picture, you'll naturally take fewer and begin skipping over subpar images, leaving yourself with a smaller and superior set of images to sort through later. As someone with a backlog of, at the time of writing, over 15,000 images, anything that can be done to decrease the amount of time spent in post is a (not so) small miracle. Capture less, keep more, publish faster!

Did I miss something? Could something be explained better? Is something simply spelled wrong? Or did I just do an amazing job? Let me know what you think: rickbattle@rickbattle.com!